Madiha Zahrah Choksi
Madiha Zahrah Choksi

M A D I H A Z A H R A H C H O K S I

As of Fall 2025, I am on the job market for both academic and industry research positions!

I am a fifth year Ph.D. candidate in the department of Computing and Information Science at Cornell Tech in New York City. I am advised by Helen Nissenbaum and James Grimmelmann.

My research sits at the intersection of human–computer interaction, privacy and security, and law and policy, with a focus on community governance.

I study online governance through two primary arenas: privacy and intellectual property. My research investigates how governance mechanisms (e.g., privacy controls, licenses, and participatory protocols) enable or constrain how communities manage their data, participation, and shared resources. I work in partnership with communities and combine qualitative, sociometric, and computational methods with legal and policy analysis.

My research goal is to design and evaluate governance infrastructures that work for the communities who rely on them.

I am a member of the Digital Life Initiative, the Cornell Tech Research Lab in Applied Law and Technology, and an alumni of the Artificial Intelligence, Policy, and Practice Group (2021-2023).

For some time before Cornell, I was the Digital Learning Specialist at Columbia University. I completed a Master in Information from the University of Toronto in 2016, and a Master of Arts from Columbia University in 2018.

N E W S

S E L E C T E D P U B L I C A T I O N S

W O R K I N G P R O J E C T S

  • Madiha Z. Choksi, Matt Franchi, and Helen Nissenbaum. “Contextual Rule-making at Scale:

    AI Moderation for Group Privacy Governance.”

  • Madiha Z. Choksi, Madelyn Rose Sanfilippo, Yan Shvartzshnaider, Min Cheong Kim. “Assessment Integrity Norms: Consumer and Student Privacy in Ed-Tech." (Forthcoming chapter in Governing Edtech in Schools and Universities, Cambridge University Press, June 2025)

A W A R D S & F U N D I N G

  • 2024: Cornell Tech Dean’s Excellence Fellowship

  • 2023: Digital Life Initiative Doctoral Fellowship

  • 2021: Economic Security Project: Anti-Monopoly Fund Grant

  • 2021: CIS Deans Excellence Hopper-Dean Fellowship, Cornell University.

  • 2020: Legal Literacies for Text Data Mining Grant, University of California Berkeley.

C O N T A C T

  • Google Scholar

  • mc2376 [at] cornell [dot] edu | m [dot] choksi [at] columbia [dot] edu